Alice Trillin

The disbelief that enveloped what we began witnessing on the morning of September 11th—the shock upon shock, the televised images that we fixated upon with deepening incomprehension—signified that for most New Yorkers our emotional anguish lacked an immediate focus. At The New Yorker offices the next day, the news arrived that, during the night, in a hospital at the opposite end of Manhattan from the World Trade Center, Alice Stewart Trillin, the wife—and, as the Times noted, the “muse”—of our colleague Calvin (Bud) Trillin, had died of congestive heart failure. Like that, our already overwhelming agony gave way to a particularized sadness and grief. A woman of extraordinary beauty, intelligence, wit—and, most strikingly, relentless optimism—had, in a moment of absolute global madness, slipped away. She was sixty-three.

Readers knew Alice from her husband's writings about food, travel, and domestic life, in which she assumed the role of comic foil (a pragmatist possessed of “a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day,” a do-gooder who insisted that a twenty-dollar bill found lying on a Greenwich Village sidewalk must be turned in to the lost-property desk at the neighborhood police precinct). Professional colleagues knew her, during a variegated career, as a college professor who taught writing and designed writing curriculums and as a producer of award-winning arts-education television documentaries. She was, as well, a discerning reader and editor and a writer of graceful and lucid essays (including one published in this magazine earlier this year, “Betting Your Life”) that derived from her experience, in her late thirties, of being diagnosed with lung cancer. (Though she never smoked, she had grown up in a household in which both parents did.) For the remaining twenty-five years of her life, she had the unblinking wisdom to recognize each new day for what it was—a gift that she was eager to share with her husband, their adored daughters, Abigail and Sarah, and a multitude of lucky friends. She also gave her time and energy to a variety of charitable causes, most notably the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for children with cancer and blood-related illnesses.

Bud Trillin would refer wryly to Alice's “singular world view.” It was the sort of thing he had in mind when, delivering a toast at Sarah's wedding, last year, in Los Angeles, he observed the bushels (but tasteful bushels) of floral arrangements that Alice had marshalled for the occasion and remarked, “Evidently there are five or six uncut flowers remaining in Southern California.” One spring day a few years ago, during a postprandial stroll along a canal towpath in southern New Jersey, she exclaimed to a group of friends, “Everyone, come look at this beautiful dung-colored toad!” That was Alice, never not singular. In one of her essays—she happened to have been describing her encounter with cancer but, it now seems, she was also prescribing a transcendence of the spirit to which this city and country might aspire—she wrote, “It astonishes me that having faced the terror, we continue to live, even to live with a great deal of joy.”

Mark Singer, a longtime contributor to the magazine, is the author of several books, including “Character Studies.”